5 Brilliant Startup Ideas From MITs New Crop of Graduates

MIT is Division I in academia, and like their counterparts in sports, lots of students turn pro before graduation. As the Class of 2008 tosses their high-tech hats in the air, we look at projects--from a Google Android program out to beat the new iPhone, to a low-tech solution for Sudanese farmers--with the potential to shake things up in the real world.

1. The Open-Source Green Car /// VDS Vision

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Two years ago, MIT whiz-kids Robyn Allen and Anna Jaffe set their sights on India, where a $2500 car is just the beginning. "Over the next 30 years they'll buy an extra 90 million cars," Jaffe says. "So our thought was, Well, what if we could develop a vehicle that was much, much more efficient--that maybe hit 200 miles per gallon, that plugged into a grid, that was really designed around Indian needs and expectations and wants."

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The two organized the Vehicle Design Summit, a global consortium of students working in teams to build a better car from the ground up, leveraging the collective brainpower of a new generation of engineers and the massive resources of their respective educational institutions. This summer, teams will rendezvous in Torino, Italy, to flesh out a final prototype for the VDS Vision 100, a six-passenger electric car powered by a gas generator. It's expected to get 100 miles per gallon and could be production ready in 2009.

What about 200 mpg? Save that for next summer.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE...

2. The iPhone 3G Killer /// Locale

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Imagine this: You walk into your office, and your cellphone knows to forward calls to your desk. You go to the movies, and your phone automatically switches off its ringer. This, essentially, is the gist of Locale, a program for Google's open-source Android mobile platform that harnesses your phone's built-in GPS to control what it does based on where it's located.

Written by MIT seniors Carter Jernigan, Christina Wright and Jasper Lin, along with sophomore Clare Bayle, the software has already won $25,000 of the $10 million put up by Google to spur development for the platform, which is impressive considering nobody outside Google has yet seen a phone that runs it. (Apple just released its iPhone 3G with built-in GPS, and the war will certainly be on to keep pace.)

"I think it would be hard to call it 1.0 until there's actual phones available, but what we're doing for the next release is going to be really solid," Jernigan says. Due by the end of July, the next version will be eligible for up to $275,000. Phones running Android, or "gPhones," should hit markets later this year.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE...

3. The Off-the-Shelf Sun Booster /// Solar Concentrator

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At present, solar power has a hard time competing with fossil-fuel equivalents, but a team of students led by freshly minted MIT graduate Spencer Ahrens is working to bring costs down with a solar concentrator--essentially a 12-foot network of shiny mirrors--that boosts the sun's intensity by up to 1,000 times, producing 10,000 watts of heat and, eventually, 3,500 watts of electricity.

What's more, they're doing it with cheap, off-the-shelf parts and simple mechanics: Their device tracks the sun with an elegant array of electric motors triggered by baffled photocells--almost like a sundial. When the cells drift into shadow, motors whirr and rotate the contraption until it's once again perfectly aligned.

"It's basically just a big set of mirrors on a stick--just holding a mirror up to the sun," Ahrens says. "Our design mantra is basically to use commodity materials to make it as low-cost as possible so that it really can make a huge impact without all these government subsidies."

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE...

4. The Lifecasters /// Justin.tv

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Justin Kan had an idea--to broadcast his life online, EDtv-style, 24 hours a day. Trouble was, no mobile hardware or software existed to wirelessly transmit a continuous video feed from Kan's body from any place he happened to go.

So Kan recruited Kyle Vogt, then an MIT junior, to build one for his fledgling startup. On a "leave of absence" from school, Vogt cobbled together a 15-pound backpack, filled with a huge battery that lasted eight hours on a charge, a tiny Linux computer running custom-built software and four EVDO cellular modems--all transmitting video from a webcam clipped to Kan's baseball cap.

A year later, Justin.tv has exploded into the premier lifecasting site on the Web, with over 250 Justins across the world broadcasting their lives at any given time, and 60,000 distinct broadcasters overall. Vogt, now vice president of engineering at Justin.tv, is unsure when--or if--he'll return to his alma mater. He says things are pretty busy keeping servers running as bandwidth continues to double every two months.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE...

5. The Sudanese Stairmaster /// Treadle Pumps

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For many of Sudan's subsistence farmers, "irrigation" amounts to hauling water to their crops in buckets--diesel pumps are far too expensive, as is the fuel to run them. So MIT classmates Zahir Dossa and Mustafa Dafalla looked for a cheap, reliable, low-tech solution, and settled on treadle pumps--a pair of human powered levers that use pistons to suck water up from depths of 20 ft. or more in just a few glute-tightening hours per day.

"It's basically like a Stairmaster--you just shift your weight from one foot to the other," Dossa says. "Pretty much all the farmers live on the Nile river basin, which makes it optimal for this kind of water pump."

The first shipment of 375 pumps will land under farmers' feet in the first week of July; proceeds will allow the non-profit company to purchase and sell more throughout the region. Each pump will triple a farmer's food production, Dossa says, paying for itself within a year.